The announcement that the Web Standards Project is going to have a period of inactivity for a while has been met with a mixture of criticism and respect from the web design community. Maybe it was a result of Zeldman’s slightly ambiguous posting to the front page of webstandards.org, but there has been a definite over-reaction to this news. It’s as if the WaSP is the life and soul of the move towards a standardised Web and without it, the Web will regress back into a mess of propriatory HTML tags and browser-centric standards. Undoubtedly, the project has done much to stop this from happening, and it has provided guidance to web designers on how to build sites that are compliant to W3C standards, interoperable and future-proof. The instructions are there, laid down in the archives of webstandards.org and A List Apart, now it is up to developers to take the challenge and design sites that separate style from content and most importantly validate. After all, it is a better way to design. Having said that, it isn’t easy; I spend half my time pulling my hair out trying to get my valid code working across so-called standards compliant web-browsers. Of course, I could bodge something together in Dreamweaver or Flash and be done with it, get it through the door. But no, I’d rather spend time getting it right, because there is a right way of doing it. Unfortunately, so many respectable organisations and companies are still getting it wrong and this is what is holding back the standards compliant web. The WaSP’s job is done; now it’s time for XHTML, CSS and the ideals of interoperability to be embraced by a much larger community of designers.